Everything is relative in the world of big business:
French supermarket group Carrefour, the world’s second-biggest retailer after Wal Mart, has been fined 1.5 million euros by a French court for false advertising.
The group had been accused of advertising products which were either unavailable in sufficient quantities, were not sold at the advertised price or did not match the description in the group’s sales catalogue.
The court fined the group another 500,000 euros, taking the total to 2.0 million euros, for below-cost selling and collusion with suppliers.
That may sound like a lot of money, but Carrefour’s annual turnover is 86.5 billion euros. A fine of 2 million euros is as little as their turnover in just six minutes.
